Tabs

Although there are many other uses, hugin is primarily a
tool for assembling multiple photos and creating a 'seamless' panorama.

Hugin is a program that is 'tab' based. Below you see an partial example screen of Hugin showing the button bar and the tabs.

This process of assembling multiple photos and creating a 'seamless' panorama is completely automatic
if you use the hugin Assistant tab, which is the default tab,
but hugin also allows full manual control of every stage.
So hugin divides up the various stages and presents them as tabs
in the main window. These tabs are roughly in the order of panorama
creation from left to right, though in practice fine-tuning a project can
involve some jumping around between tabs.

This is a quick overview of this tab system, it isn't a step by step tutorial,
you can find these on the hugin website.

Assistant

The hugin Assistant tab is the fully automatic part of hugin, here you can
load images, align them and stitch them into a panorama without having to use
any of the other tabs.

Alternatively, you can use this Assistant as the first step in creating a
project that will involve the use some or all of the other tabs:

Images

In the hugin Images tab you can add or remove photos to and from your project.
The table in the middle also shows the positions in the final scene for each of the
images. These positions are actually angles for roll, pitch and yaw.

Although you can enter these positions manually here, you are more likely to
create control points automatically with the builtin feature matcher which
will try to find equal points in overlapping images automatically for you, after which
the optimiser in the hugin Optimizer tab positions your images for you.
In some cases the feature matcher doesn't detect correct overlapping points in which
case you can add control points manually in the hugin Control Points tab.

Camera and Lens

Photos have properties that need to be known in order to assemble them
seamlessly, notably geometric properties such as field of view or
barrel distortion, plus photometric properties such as vignetting
or exposure.

Again, although you could enter parameters for these properties here in the
hugin Camera and Lens tab; hugin can estimate the field of view
from data stored in the photo by the camera, it can also use the optimisers
in the hugin Optimizer tab to calculate the geometric distortion, and in the
hugin Exposure tab to calculate photometric corrections.

Crop

Often photos contain parts that you don't want to be used. Typically
fisheye Projection images have a circular area in the middle with
a useless black area outside. Scanned images have edges that need to
be cropped away.

The hugin Crop tab allows you to apply simple masks to ignore these
areas from your photos.

Mask

Often photos contain parts which should not be used in the final panorama (e.g. moving objects),
alternatively you may need to specifically include a distinctive feature (e.g. persons) in the final panorama.

The Hugin Mask tab allows you to mask these areas for inclusion or exclusion from the stitched panorama.

Control Points

hugin stitches panoramas by matching identical features in different
photos, these features are defined by pairs of control points.
The hugin Control Points tab shows two photos at a time and allows
you to manually create and edit any pair of control points.

So for this to work, the photos in the project have to be already aligned. Align
photos by managing control points in the hugin Control Points tab and optimising
geometric image parameters in the hugin Optimizer tab.

Stitcher

The end result of a hugin project is an image file containing a panorama. The
final hugin Stitcher tab is where size and quality are set and where this output
file is created.

Write PTStitcher script, saves a simplified project file suitable for batch stitching with PTStitcher, nona or PTmender. Note that nona can stitch a hugin project file directly, so this step is unnecessary when using nona.